


Retribution

by ssrhpurgatory



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Canonical Character Death - Alexander Hilbert, Other, Past Hilbert/Rosemary, Some people mourn by planning to burn down a company
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:01:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28470543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssrhpurgatory/pseuds/ssrhpurgatory
Summary: Twenty years ago, Rosemary Epps let herself love Alexander Hilbert for a little while. Now, he's dead, and her fucking boss doesn't even have the guts to tell her about it to her face.
Relationships: Alexander Hilbert/Original Female Character
Comments: 2
Kudos: 1





	Retribution

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Missives from the Black](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21509380) by [ssrhpurgatory](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssrhpurgatory/pseuds/ssrhpurgatory). 



> During Missives from the Black, which I do not recommend reading as it is some of my earlier fic and boy is some of it clunky, Rosemary and Hilbert almost choose one another over their work, and instead choose duty instead, and Rosemary dies in the late 90s. This is a look at how Rosemary might have reacted to Hilbert's death had she survived until then.

Rosemary’s office phone rang, and her assistant answered it, then handed it immediately to Rosemary without a word. “Epps,” said Rosemary, frowning at her assistant.

“Rosmarin, get to the archives now.”

“Adriane?”

“You have five minutes.” There was a click as Adriane hung up.

“Laurie, cover things here,” said Rosemary, getting to her feet and hastening out the door. Forty-five seconds later she was down in the underground corridors that connected the buildings on campus, heading for the archives at a dead run.

The last time Rosemary had heard that tone in Adriane’s voice, she’d just gotten the report of Al’s first stroke.

These days, there was only one person’s death who would make Adriane call for Rosemary like that, but until she had the proof in front of her, she wasn’t going to believe it.

One minute left, and she skidded through the door into the archives that Adriane was holding open for her, snatching the report out of Adriane’s hand, scanning the words on the page in front of her for the name she was looking for, scanning past the confirmed theta scenario, past the other deaths, to find… “Alexander Hilbert deceased,” she read off, in a voice that sounded strangely distant to her own ears. “Oh, Dmitri. You should have known better than to mutiny with Kepler on board.”

Adriane pulled the sheet of paper out of Rosemary’s numb fingers and went off to put it in the Black. And then, Rosemary was left there, barely breathing, a frozen shell of a human being.

He hadn’t been anything to her for years. She’d told herself that again and again. She’d acted it out, day after day, not even daring to show him the friendly warmth she’d once been able to offer him. She’d been the corporate bitch, because she had to be, if they were both going to survive.

But he hadn’t survived.

Adriane appeared back at Rosemary’s side. “They are going out there. Pryce and Cutter. I am sure you will get a call from Pryce at any moment.”

Rosemary took a deep breath, centering herself in her body. “I’d better get back to my office, then, and make sure I’m ready for her,” she said, her voice still distant and numb to her own ears.

“Rosmarin—”

“I’ll be fine, Adriane.”

And she would be. For just as long as it took to make sure that nothing Marcus Cutter had ever built in his life was ever fine again. For just as long as it took to burn Goddard Futuristics to the ground.

Because it turned out that without Dmitri Vologin, there was no reason for her to survive either.

Rosemary made it back to her office right as the call came in that she was needed in Pryce’s lab. So she headed straight there, her mind already calculating weight ratios, already tallying the supplies currently on the Sol. It was the distraction she needed in that moment, a bit of normalcy she could use to hide the way she was feeling.

She wasn’t surprised to see Cutter in the lab as well as Pryce, but she did her best to fake it.

“Dr. Pryce?”

“Rosemary. I need you to get some supplies sent up to the Sol for me.”

“Of course. What will you need?”

Rosemary let herself get lost in her efficient work persona, making a list and checking it over with Pryce, adding a few suggestions of her own. Cutter watched silently from the corner of the lab as they worked, a predatory little smile on his face.

Finally, they were done, and Rosemary flipped her little notebook shut with a snap. “I’ll have this to the launch site, when? Tomorrow morning?”

Pryce looked to Cutter. “Oh-eight-hundred,” he said, in his airy way, as if he were unaware that Rosemary and her assistant and probably half-a-dozen lab techs would be working full-tilt all night to achieve this little miracle.

“Very good, sir. I’ll get on with it, then,” said Rosemary, turning to leave.

“Wait just a moment, Rosemary,” he called after her.

Rosemary turned to face Mr. Cutter, clenching her jaw, hoping he would read it merely as frustration at the delay before she could get on with her work. “Yes, sir?”

“I’ll be going too. And Young.”

Rosemary raised an eyebrow. “And this has something to do with me, sir?”

Cutter chuckled. “We might be some time. I want you to oversee special projects while we’re gone.”

Rosemary did her best to hide her surprise. She’d expected to have to work behind the scenes. But if he was leaving special projects in her care… “I’m sure there are plenty of other people more qualified, sir,” she managed to get out. “I’m pretty strictly biochem. I wouldn’t know what to do with half the projects you’ve got going.”

“But none of those other people know this company half as well as you do,” said Cutter, standing and crossing the room to her. He took her hands in his, and Rosemary suppressed a shudder. “And none of those other people have shown your… devotion to this company.”

“I see,” said Rosemary blankly. And then, because it was true, because she was devoted to Goddard, because Cutter had given her a place to truly spread her wings when she’d thought she was going to spend the rest of her life in dead-end jobs, she decided to give him one chance. One chance to tell the truth. “May I ask where you’re going, sir? It just seems unusual that you’d be picking, ah, devotion over experience.”

“Wolf 359,” Cutter said, smiling down at her.

“Well, while you’re out there, could you remind Dr. Hilbert that it doesn’t matter what kind of stresses he’s operating under, I still expect him to send regular reports on his projects? I haven’t gotten one in months.”

Cutter did not even hesitate for a moment. “Of course. I’ll make sure dear Alexander knows his lab manager is worried about him.”

Rosemary rolled her eyes, faking disdainful amusement even as the frost inside her turned into a deep freeze. “Worried about making deadlines, more like. I have people waiting on the results of some of those experiments, you know.” She carefully extracted her hands from Cutter’s, surprised she wasn’t shaking, and took a step back from him. “If that’s all, sir, I’m going to go now.”

“You’re dismissed,” he said with a nonchalant wave of his hand, and Rosemary fled the lab, back to her office, letting the work that needed to be done over the next eighteen hours take over.

But deep inside, she was simply waiting until the moment that she could make Marcus Cutter pay for the death of the man she’d never allowed herself to admit she loved.

Rosemary had figured out how to make him hate her, in the end.

Decima had done it. Decima, and the bonds of attachment that always grew between members of a crew, out there in space.

She’d been the one to make the call, of course. Both calls. Cutter had passed down an ultimatum: he was finally tired of waiting for results, and if Elias Selberg couldn’t get the results he was looking for, Cutter was ready to give the project—the entire project—to someone else.

So she’d been the one who had to tell him to infect the other members of the crew. First Sam Lambert, then Kuan Hui.

And when he’d protested, she’d told him the truth, in the cruelest way she could, because sometimes cruelty was the only way to get through to the man. That Cutter had already moved some of the research to other scientists. That his mind must be getting weak with age, if he believed that Cutter wouldn’t take it all away, wouldn’t do something terrible with it just to spite him.

They’d fought when he got back to Earth after that mission. He hadn’t yelled, not once; his voice had instead been full of a quiet disappointment that was worse than any yelling could have ever been.

“It used to be that you would not have done something like this,” he’d said, and it was true, but more than thirty years under Cutter’s thumb had worn her down.

Once she would have said no. Once, not even Mace Fisher would have passed muster as a test subject. But once was long ago, when it had seemed like Decima was going somewhere, when she still had what it took to hold up under the constant onslaught of progress, progress, progress.

But she was old, and very, very tired, and it was so very hard.

He’d looked like hell when he’d come back; they’d stuck him in a stasis pod for the trip, and he hadn’t had the time to heal up from the beating Isabel Lovelace had given him before blasting off into the star. She’d wanted to take care of him, desperately.

But finally, after years of her trying to get it through his thick skull, he’d realized what she was. A monster, of her own making and Goddard’s. And he’d hated her for it, because he saw in her the reflection of what he’d been turning into for all these years.

She’d done her best to make it up to him. It had taken a lot of work, finding someone who was right, getting Mr. Cutter to agree to give Dmitri one more attempt at Decima, but she’d done it because she couldn’t stand the idea of him hating her, for all she knew she deserved to be hated.

“His name is Doug Eiffel,” she’d said, before he left for his next mission. “He kidnapped his daughter, crashed a car with her in it. She’ll probably never hear again. And he put a teenaged boy in a wheelchair for life.”

He’d nodded, and looked as if he was about to say something, but in the end he simply thanked her.

And he’d left.

And she’d never seen him again.

And now he was dead.

And now?

Now she’d get her revenge.

Adriane hadn’t been sure what to expect from Rosemary, but it wasn’t this. Pryce and Cutter and Miss Young had left Earth nearly a month before, and since then, Rosemary had been… normal, almost. Busier than usual, but that was only to be expected with Rosemary’s temporary promotion to head of Special Projects.

That worried Adriane.

Years ago, when Alexander Hilbert had gone by the alias of Karl Kelley, Rosemary had fallen in love with him. She had always denied it, not that Adriane had ever asked. But while Rosemary had been with Karl, for that short while she had been happier than Adriane had ever seen her.

But happiness couldn’t last in this place, not when it interfered with efficiency.

Still, it wasn’t a surprise when Rosemary was waiting outside of Adriane’s office early one morning, long before anyone else was in the archives. It might have been a surprise to find her in the archives before they were unlocked, but it would have been more of a surprise to find out that Rosemary hadn’t obtained keys to every level but the Black over the years.

“Rosmarin.”

“Adriane,” Rosemary said in a blank, cold voice.

Adriane unlocked the door of her office. “Well. Come in, then.”

Rosemary closed the door behind them and stood there as Adriane went around her desk and stood on the other side, hands tucked behind her back.

“I need your help, Adriane,” Rosemary said, her voice still lacking its usual vigor.

“What do you need?”

“I need Al.”

Adriane blinked. This actually was a surprise. “You need Al.”

“Yes.”

“I cannot remove him from the Black, Rosmarin. Not even for you.” Adriane tried to keep her own voice calm and even, but suspected she was failing. Rosemary asking for Al could only mean one thing: she had decided that she needed his strategic genius from beyond the grave for some foolhardy crusade, and intended to force his brainscan to share space with her own mind, a dangerous action for a woman who was only human.

Rosemary only stared evenly at Adriane, clearly having said what she had come here to say and planning to stay until Adriane gave her the answer she wanted.

Adriane felt a little frown form between her eyebrows. “What do you intend to do with him, if you have him?”

“You know what I intend to do,” Rosemary said, and just for a moment her voice wavered, perhaps with anxiety.

“Rosmarin, you are not Pryce. You are not Cutter. You are not _me._ I know they have offered you some… modifications, over the years, but you have always refused them.”

“Yes. I have. But I know Pryce’s research in that area inside and out, and I can hold him, Adriane. At least for the length of time I need him for.”

“And after you are done, what happens then?” Adriane was angry now, and she rarely got truly angry.

Rosemary simply kept her even stare on Adriane. “After I am done, it doesn’t matter what happens.”

“Of course it does!” Adriane slammed her fist on her desk.

Rosemary shook her head. “No, Adriane. It doesn’t.”

Adriane felt deflated all of a sudden, defeated. “Even if I could help you, I would not. Rosmarin, this is foolishness.”

“If you won’t give me Al, I will use the pieces of him that I can get without going into the Black, Adriane. I will take them from wherever I can get them. The security AI. The restraining bolt program. I’m sure there are bits and pieces of the useful part of him scattered all through our systems.” Rosemary’s voice was determined now, and it terrified Adriane.

“You cannot. Please, Rosmarin, do not do this.”

Rosemary crossed around the desk and took Adriane’s hands in her own. “One way or another, I am doing this, Adriane. I will do that without your help, but I would rather do it with you by my side.”

Adriane took a deep breath and shut her eyes, closing out the earnest look on Rosemary’s face, so much more terrible and terrifying than the blank one she’d been wearing when she had met Adriane that morning. And then she answered.

“I will bring you Al.”

“Thank you.”

“Do not thank me yet, Rosmarin.”

"Adriane?"

She opened her eyes and looked at her friend, a great, gaping mass of grief opening inside her chest. "Rosmarin?"

"I've been cheating death for twenty years," Rosemary said, tears beading at the corners of her eyes. "It's time."

Her eyes fell shut again, and just for a moment she let that grief overwhelm her. And then she released it, bringing herself back to the present moment. "As have I."

Rosemary squeezed her hands firmly. "So, together then?"

Adriane nodded. "Together."

Isabel Lovelace had expected to spend the rest of her life trying to take down Goddard Futuristics.

What she hadn’t expected was to come back to Earth to find a company crippled, as if someone had strategically taken it apart from the inside out, exploiting weak spots in the management structure, destroying entire departments. The Goddard Futuristics that existed when she got back to Earth was a mere shell of its former self, on the verge of bankruptcy, its sins laid out for the rest of humanity to judge.

She didn’t know who to thank for it, but if she ever met them she would shake their hand.

Probably for the better that Isabel never learned who had done it. If she ever learned the extent of Rosemary’s sins, she might have changed her mind about that handshake.

And not like a dead woman could appreciate a handshake anyway.


End file.
